Kartchner Star Party – Saturday, October 13

“Camels in the Sky: Our Heritage of Arabian Star Lore”

Saturday, October 13 at 5:30 in the Discovery Center.

Dr. Danielle Adams, a recent graduate from the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona and NASA Space Grant fellow, will speak about the rich star lore of Arabia as it was more than a thousand years ago. Camels, vultures, goats, wild cows and many other kinds of animals graced the skies of the Arabian desert, and some of these survive in the star names used by astronomers today. Danielle will especially focus on the stars that are visible in the fall so that visitors can find them after the talk in the park’s famously dark sky. Some of these stories can be found on her website, onesky.arizona.edu.

June Guest Speaker: Dr. Chad Bender

The meeting will be held on June 8th in the Student Union Building at Cochise College 901 N. Colombo Avenue, Sierra Vista at 7pm

Dr. Chad Bender studies exoplanets to improve our understanding of how planets and planetary systems form and evolve. He and colleagues are currently building a pair of spectrometers that will search close- by stars for Earth sized planets that might be capable of supporting life.

Dr. Bender received his Ph.D. in 2006. He is currently an Associate Astronomer at The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory

The first exoplanets discovered in 1993 paved the way for an astronomical revolution. The subsequent 25 years have revealed thousands of planets orbiting stars, with a diversity of characteristics not seen in our Solar System, nor even previously imagined. Over the past decade, astronomers have pushed detection sensitivities towards smaller and smaller planets and are now finally at the cusp of discovering Earth like planets around nearby stars. Dr. Bender will describe some of these discoveries, and the cutting-edge instrumentation and surveys that are finding them.

May Guest Speaker: Dr. David Sand

Our May 18th meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. David Sand.

Dr. Sand will give a presentation titled: Gravitational Waves and Things that Go Boom in the Night

In his presentation, Dr. Sand talks about the ‘time domain’ revolution in astronomy, and how we are finding new ways to study stars that merge, burp and explode by looking at their imprints on space-time via gravitational waves. He will highlight recent results on the gravitational wave detection of the merger of two neutron stars and look to the future of this field. Dr. Sand’s interest in things that go bump in the night led to his team’s search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.Continue reading→